Corrigendum and Clarification - Mainstream, July 27, 2019

Saturday 27 July 2019

After the publication of the last issue of Mainstream (July 20, 2019), Sankar Ray, who wrote the tribute to Santosh Rana (“A Naxalite of a Distinctive Strain”—pp. 29-30), sent the following letter to the weekly’s editor:

“I did not describe Paresh Chattopadhyay as a ‘Marxist’ scholar but a ‘Marx scholar’. The two are mutually different. Most of the scholars associated with the international project for publishing the complete works of Marx and Engels—The Marx-Engels-Gesamt-ausgabe or Mega—in 114 volumes from the Amsterdam-headquartered Internationale Marx-Engels-Stiftung under the International Marx-Engels Foundation or IMES do not describe themselves as Marxists.

“Marx himself cautioned Paul Lafargue and Jules Guesde, the two top French socialist leaders, after a meeting of the First International in 1881 in chaste French: ‘Ce qu’il y a de certain c’est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste. (If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.)’ This reflected Marx’s irritation he felt at the silent endorsement of the prefix ‘Marxist’ by Lafargue and Guesde.”

So the second sentence of the last para of the tribute to Santosh Rana on page 30 (Mainstream, July 20, 2019) should read: “Eminent Marx scholar Paresh Chattopadhyay in an e-mail to this scribe (Sankar Ray—editor)....”